- end_line
- 1116
- extracted_at
- 2026-01-30T07:57:55.409Z
- extracted_by
- structure-extraction-lambda
- start_line
- 1042
- text
- proceeding was quite out of the common; while Nippers, twitching in his
chair with a dyspeptic nervousness, ground out, between his set teeth,
occasional hissing maledictions against the stubborn oaf behind the
screen. And for his (Nippers’s) part, this was the first and the last
time he would do another man’s business without pay.
Meanwhile Bartleby sat in his hermitage, oblivious to everything but
his own peculiar business there.
Some days passed, the scrivener being employed upon another lengthy
work. His late remarkable conduct led me to regard his ways narrowly. I
observed that he never went to dinner; indeed, that he never went
anywhere. As yet I had never, of my personal knowledge, known him to be
outside of my office. He was a perpetual sentry in the corner. At about
eleven o’clock though, in the morning, I noticed that Ginger Nut would
advance toward the opening in Bartleby’s screen, as if silently
beckoned thither by a gesture invisible to me where I sat. The boy
would then leave the office, jingling a few pence, and reappear with a
handful of ginger-nuts, which he delivered in the hermitage, receiving
two of the cakes for his trouble.
He lives, then, on ginger-nuts, thought I; never eats a dinner,
properly speaking; he must be a vegetarian, then; but no; he never eats
even vegetables, he eats nothing but ginger-nuts. My mind then ran on
in reveries concerning the probable effects upon the human constitution
of living entirely on ginger-nuts. Ginger-nuts are so called, because
they contain ginger as one of their peculiar constituents, and the
final flavoring one. Now, what was ginger? A hot, spicy thing. Was
Bartleby hot and spicy? Not at all. Ginger, then, had no effect upon
Bartleby. Probably, he preferred it should have none.
Nothing so aggravates an earnest person as a passive resistance. If the
individual so resisted be of a not inhumane temper, and the resisting
one perfectly harmless in his passivity, then, in the better moods of
the former, he will endeavor charitably to construe to his imagination
what proves impossible to be solved by his judgment. Even so, for the
most part, I regarded Bartleby and his ways. Poor fellow! thought I, he
means no mischief; it is plain he intends no insolence; his aspect
sufficiently evinces that his eccentricities are involuntary. He is
useful to me. I can get along with him. If I turn him away, the chances
are he will fall in with some less-indulgent employer, and then he will
be rudely treated, and perhaps driven forth miserably to starve. Yes.
Here I can cheaply purchase a delicious self-approval. To befriend
Bartleby; to humor him in his strange willfulness, will cost me little
or nothing, while I lay up in my soul what will eventually prove a
sweet morsel for my conscience. But this mood was not invariable, with
me. The passiveness of Bartleby sometimes irritated me. I felt
strangely goaded on to encounter him in new opposition—to elicit some
angry spark from him answerable to my own. But, indeed, I might as well
have essayed to strike fire with my knuckles against a bit of Windsor
soap. But one afternoon the evil impulse in me mastered me, and the
following little scene ensued:
“Bartleby,” said I, “when those papers are all copied, I will compare
them with you.”
“I would prefer not to.”
“How? Surely you do not mean to persist in that mulish vagary?”
No answer.
I threw open the folding-doors near by, and, turning upon Turkey and
Nippers, exclaimed:
“Bartleby a second time says, he won’t examine his papers. What do you
think of it, Turkey?”
It was afternoon, be it remembered. Turkey sat glowing like a brass
boiler; his bald head steaming; his hands reeling among his blotted
papers.
“Think of it?” roared Turkey; “I think I’ll just step behind his
screen, and black his eyes for him!”
- title
- Chunk 9